When you look at any SimCity title since it was bought out by EA, and as Will Wright as gradually pulled away from EA and the game, things steadily became more lazy. By that I mean in SC3000 I remember there being many complaints about the fact that although you could build roads that looked like avenues, the traffic still used them as single lane/two way roads. I also remember there being a lot of things that simply didn't work properly, were left out, never patched in SC4....People now fondly remember and praise SC4 but the truth is that its continued success has far more to do with the modding community, EA did nothing.
You often find with games that after years of modding people look back and tell you how great a game it was, totally forgetting that when released it wasn't that great and needed a lot of work from fans to make it the game you now think of, forgetting that the dev/publisher were actually quite lazy and did nothing more than release another half finished product and still didn't listen to all the things people raised about the previous games.
How many times have people asked EA/Maxis about things like more road types, a proper tool for tunnels and bridges, and map editors. Remember, the last SC game to have a proper editor included was actually SC2000. All the others simply had a kind of cheat that allowed us to import bitmaps, not a proper editor.
I have loved the SC series and always will, fondly remember spending hours upon hours playing those games, but when you look back at the original game, before the modding community got to work on it, their games can only be described as a lazy effort from one of the biggest developers/publishers in gaming history. IMO they ought to be able to do better, I take the point that more money doesn't equal a better game, but quite frankly I don't think EA have really delivered the goods in an SC game for quite a long time. Too many things continually left out, and as I said items requested by just about every single fan of the game kept getting left out. EA are hopeless and listening to fans, and still with SC2013 they didn't understand what it is fans want, I think they must be blind or unable to read, its been painfully obvious for a long time what it is we want....many types of roads including one way versions of each of them, proper tools for tunnels and bridges, and most of all a decent editor and start officially supporting the mod community....no need to reinvent the game like they talked about, its not that complicated, just build the same game with newer graphics and add the things we've been asking for since the mid 90s.
CSL to me is a winner because they have already done the right thing, this game is open for modding with official support from CO, they're going to give us the tools, and so far the only real complaints I've seen on here is the airport being too small, and farms....but even those who are asking for those to be made bigger would surely have to admit they are fairly minor issues and even if CO dont fix them some modder probably will. so no need to panic. Whatever CO dont do, someone else will. Failing to embrace the community is the biggest mistake EA has made for the SC franchise.
Long post so I better end it but just list a few games I play myself that thrive because of the way they've embraced modding the their communities:
rFactor
ArmA
Trainz
and now we finally have a city builder with the brains to do the same thing, communities make games last long after their release.
